How to Get Instagram Profile Data with an API (2026 Guide)

Instagram is the richest source of creator and brand data on the internet — and one of the hardest to get at programmatically. The official Graph API only works for accounts you own, and it demands Facebook app review before it returns anything useful. If you want a *public* account’s follower count, bio, verified status, or recent posts, there is no first-party endpoint for you.

This guide shows the simplest path: a single authenticated GET request that returns clean JSON for any public Instagram profile — no login, no cookies, no headless browser to babysit. Try it on the console above (it is a real API call), then wire it into your app in a few minutes.

What you can pull

The /v1/instagram/profile endpoint returns the canonical stored profile: username, full name, biography, follower and following counts, post count, verified and business flags, the profile picture, and AI enrichment when we have it. Pass a username, an @handle, or a full instagram.com/username URL as q. Use /v1/live/instagram/profile when you need a freshly acquired canonical account backed by an exact archived profile document.

Authentication

Create a free account, generate a kb_live_… key in the dashboard, and send it as a Bearer token. Keep the key server-side — never ship it in client JavaScript.

Authorization: Bearer $VIREV_API_KEY

Your first request

Here is the same call the live console makes, in three languages. All you change is the q value.

curl "https://api.virev.ai/v1/instagram/profile?q=nike" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VIREV_API_KEY"

const res = await fetch(
  "https://api.virev.ai/v1/instagram/profile?q=nike",
  { headers: { Authorization: "Bearer kb_live_..." } },
);
const { data, meta } = await res.json();
console.log(data.summary.followers, "followers");
console.log("charged", meta.cost);

import requests

res = requests.get(
    "https://api.virev.ai/v1/instagram/profile",
    params={"q": "nike"},
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer kb_live_..."},
)
body = res.json()
print(body["data"]["summary"]["followers"], "followers")

The response

{
  "data": {
    "ok": true,
    "username": "nike",
    "summary": {
      "followers": 302000000,
      "following": 1200,
      "posts_count": 1021,
      "full_name": "Nike",
      "is_verified": true
    }
  },
  "meta": { "cost": "$0.0005", "balance": "$9.9995", "request_id": "req_de5f6bdc8ee143b29e5533ec34728e50" }
}

Getting a profile’s posts, paginated

Need the timeline, not just the summary? /v1/live/instagram/posts returns canonical posts parsed from exact REST pages, paginated by limit. Set limit=-1 to fetch up to 240 posts. Billing is one $0.0005 unit per 12 posts.

curl "https://api.virev.ai/v1/live/instagram/posts?q=nike&limit=24" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VIREV_API_KEY"

Errors and billing safety

Errors are standard HTTP codes with a stable error.code: invalid_api_key (401), insufficient_balance (402), invalid_request (400), not_found (404), and rate_limit_exceeded (429). The default rate limit is 100 requests per minute, surfaced via X-RateLimit-* headers.

Pricing

At $0.0005 per profile, one dollar buys 2,000 reads — and your first $1 is matched to a $5 balance, so you start with 10,000. No subscription, no minimums.

Build something with it

A common first project: a daily follower-count snapshot. Loop your watchlist, store summary.followers with a timestamp, and you have a growth chart in a day. Because reads are DB-cached upstream, repeated lookups are fast and cheap.

import requests, datetime

WATCHLIST = ["nike", "adidas", "underarmour"]
KEY = "kb_live_..."

for handle in WATCHLIST:
    r = requests.get(
        "https://api.virev.ai/v1/instagram/profile",
        params={"q": handle},
        headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {KEY}"},
    )
    if r.status_code != 200:
        continue  # no charge on failure — safe to skip and retry later
    s = r.json()["data"]["summary"]
    print(datetime.date.today(), handle, s["followers"])